The Beauty of Order

The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition by James Matthew Wilson. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017. Paperback, 352 pages, $30. Despite hitting a few bumps, poet James Matthew Wilson’s The Vision of the Soul delivers a...

What Can We Learn from Ancient Sophistry?

Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras’ Challenge to Socrates by Robert C. Bartlett. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Hardcover, 272 pages, $40. Reviewed by Ryan Shinkel One should be silent where one cannot speak, philosophy says, yet sophistry somehow...

The Inevitability of Liberal Failure?

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen. Yale University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 256 pages, $40. Why Liberalism Failed is a timely and radical book. It is timely because it diagnoses the deep anxiety that now characterizes American life. It is radical—in the literal...

The Words of a Giant of the Law

Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived by Antonin Scalia, edited by Christopher J. Scalia and Edward Whelan. Crown Forum, 2017. Cloth, 420 pages, $30. Antonin Scalia is the Winston Churchill of the American judiciary. He was a larger-than-life...
We’re in This Together

We’re in This Together

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. Paperback, 608 pages, $17.95. Reviewed by Sarah Ruden For a book with so many episodes of civil uproar in it, and so many accounts of both everyday and exceptional brutality, SPQR is...

Mistaking Defeat for Victory?

Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement by Daniel Bennett. University Press of Kansas, 2017. Hardcover, 224 pages, $35.One of the most compelling features of Daniel Bennett’s recent book, Defending Faith: The Politics of the...